conflux
Online Journalism Review
Racing Past the Truth"Misinformation magnifies over time. This is a law of journalism.
For an example of how the law works, visit the sixth floor of the old Texas Book Depository building in Dallas. It's a tourist shrine now. You can gaze over Dealey Plaza, imagining a Lincoln Continental cruising past, presidential occupants waving. And when you do, just about every Kennedy conspiracy theory will vanish from your mind.
The road is so damn close and the view from the sixth floor so clear that Oswald could've hit President Kennedy with a baseball, if he'd had a half-decent arm. But a few reported misunderstandings about ballistics gave rise to the second gunman theory, which snowballed into a notion of Cuban/Mafia intrigue, which ultimately led us to a terrible Oliver Stone movie. Misinformation not only magnifies, it coarsens.
This week we may be seeing the beginnings of another misinformation explosion, again arising from a death in the South: Dale Earnhardt's, in Florida on Sunday during the Daytona 500."
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[ rhetoric ]
“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"
Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.
...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”
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